Nov 4, 2014

PROFILE: CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

'Dressed in his trademark blazer, his shirt
collar skewed at the raffish angle of a schoolboy late for rugby practice,
Nolan did not seem rattled. Rather, he exuded the unshakeable confidence in his
own abilities that you might wish for in the pilot of a 747 you’ve just boarded
– an equanimity that stands him in great stead with the studio heads he
must convince to green-light his movies. “He comes in, he talks about blowing
your mind,” Grey told me, “then he very calmly accomplishes it.” Anne Hathaway,
who plays a NASA scientist in Interstellar, remembered struggling with an
important speech about the power of love, and finding herself in “an
emotionally-frayed place that was making the whole thing feel, quite frankly, a
little ‘actor-y,’ quote, unquote,” she said. Nolan came up to her and suggested
it would be much more effective if she spoke with “calm certainty” – “as
if you were saying something you had known your entire life.”

It’s how Nolan talks about a lot of things:
with the calm certainty of things he has known his entire life. Taking his seat
at the front of one of the viewing suites at the photo lab, dark but for the
glow of the computers manned by the digital colourists behind him, he munched
on peanuts, quietly issuing comments as two sets of images were projected on
the screen in front of him. On the left was the film’s IMAX 70mm print
– the format it was shot in – and on the right, the digital print in
which it will be screened in the majority of cinemas. The projections were
flipped to appear as mirror images of one another, so any slight mismatches in
luminescence could be detected and eliminated.

“As if this film weren’t trippy enough,”
one of the colourists quipped.

“That's how they advertised the original
2001,” Nolan said, “The Ultimate Trip.”

The images, showing Matthew McConaughey
approaching the event horizon of a black hole, are no less stunning than
Kubrick’s, with something of the blurred beauty of a Gerhard Richter painting.
The black hole itself was generated using calculations from theoretical
physicist Kip Throne, whose work inspired the movie, and fed into software
developed by Nolan’s effects team using computing power so vast – each frame of
film took around 100 hours of machine time – that Thorne, watching the
footage for the first time, had new insights into the way light behaves near
the event horizon of a black hole, which he plans to explore in a series of
papers for the Committee of Theoretical Physicists.

“Is
that a flare?" Nolan asked as another sequence came up, this one showing
Hathaway on an alien planet at sunset, a halo of light briefly visible at her
shoulder.

“We can take that out,” offered Walter
Volpatto, the digital colourist who was overseeing the work.

“It’s in-camera,” Nolan declared. “Put your
can of bleach away. Can you go back to the hospital scene and do a split screen
for the whole sequence. To my eyes it all looks a point brighter."

Volpatto called up the images, showing
McConaughey again, this time entering a hospital room. “It’s pretty good, I
think,” he said.

“That's always what we strive for in the
movie business – pretty good,” Nolan said sarcastically, squinting at the
two sets of images. “We lowered it [the brightness] a whole point the other
day, so something is drifting. We’re repeating ourselves.”

“I put them in,” Volpatto reassured him,
referring to the changes. “In my experience, a flipped screen will always
reveal new differences. Your eye adjusts. You clear away the moss and then you
start to see a whole new level.”

The implication seemed to be that we were
caught in the visual equivalent of Zeno’s paradox: clearing away blemishes only
to reveal still more, and so forever on, until such time as you made peace with
imperfection. “In my experience,” Nolan replied, motioning toward the bank of
computers that separated his production team from the digital colorists,
“people behind this line are full of shit.”

“This is why I prefer film to digital,”
Nolan said, turning to me. “It’s a physical object that you create, that you
agree upon. The print that I have approved when I take it from here to New York
and I put it on a different projector in New York, if it looks too blue, I know
the projector has a problem with its mirror or its ball or whatever. Those kind
of controls aren't really possible in the digital realm.”

“I have no reason to lie to you,” Volpatto
said, sounding a little miserable.

To the untrained eye there seemed to be no
difference between the two images. The atmosphere in the suite rather resembled
the air of mistrust that envelops some of Nolan’s films, epistemological
thrillers in which protagonists gripped by the desire, above all, to know, must
negotiate mazy environments in which certainty is almost impossible. “How can
you not know?” the magician played by Hugh Jackman in The Prestige demands of
his rival, after a magic trick has left his wife dead. But this could be the
cry of any of Nolan’s heroes – driven by an demand for absolute certainty
in worlds where certainty is impossible: Guy Pearce’s amnesia victim in
Memento, struggling to remember the clues that will lead him to his wife’s
killer, or Leonardo Di Caprio’s dream thief in Inception, attempting to
disentangle five levels of dream from reality. Nolan, too, has something of the
same mixture of obsessiveness and scepticism, his handsome features always
appearing slightly scrunched, as if by some internal calculus that nags at him
until it is resolved.

“You know, when you left yesterday, I felt
like I had maybe been a little rude to Walter,” he told me the next day. “I
haven't worked with him before. He doesn't know my sense of humour yet. He was
trying to please me and I was like, yeah, you're lying to me. That is my sense
of humour. But I went in this morning to finish up, and he said to me, ‘Oh, I looked
at the projector, and it was brighter.’ When he analysed it in terms of light
output – because he is a very sharp man, Walter – it was exactly one
point.”

"The book is a must for Woody Allen fans" - Joe Meyers, Connecticut Post

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R E V I E W S

"What makes the book worth taking home, however, is the excellent text... by Tom Shone, a film critic worth reading whatever aspect of the film industry he talks about. (His book Blockbuster is a must).... Most critics are at their best when speaking the language of derision but Shone has the precious gift of being carried away in a sensible manner, and of begin celebratory without setting your teeth on edge." — Clive James, Prospect "The real draw here is Shone’s text, which tells the stories behind the pictures with intelligence and grace. It’s that rarest of creatures: a coffee-table book that’s also a helluva good read." — Jason Bailey, Flavorwire

"There’s a danger of drifting into blandness with this picture packed, coffee-table format. Shone is too vigorous a critic not to put up a fight. He calls Gangs “heartbreaking in the way that only missed masterpieces can be: raging, wounded, incomplete, galvanised by sallies of wild invention”. There’s lots of jazzy, thumbnail writing of this kind... Shone on the “rich, strange and unfathomable” Taxi Driver (1976) cuts to the essence of what Scorsese is capable of." — Tim Robey, The Sunday Telegraph

"A beautiful book on the Taxi Driver director's career by former Sunday Times film critic Tom Shone who relishes Scorsese's "energetic winding riffs that mix cinema history and personal reminiscence".' — Kate Muir,The Times"No mere coffee table book. Shone expertly guides us through Scorsese’s long career.... Shone shows a fine appreciation of his subject, too. Describing Taxi Driver (1976) as having ‘the stillness of a cobra’ is both pithy and apposite.... Fascinating stuff." — Michael Doherty, RTE Guide"An admiring but clear-eyed view of the great American filmmaker’s career... Shone gives the book the heft of a smart critical biography... his arguments are always strong and his insights are fresh. The oversized book’s beauty is matched by its brains”— Connecticut Post

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“The film book of the year.... enthralling... groundbreaking.” — The Daily Telegraph

“Blockbuster is weirdly humane: it prizes entertainment over boredom, and audiences over critics, and yet it’s a work of great critical intelligence” – Nick Hornby, The Believer

“Beautifully written and very funny... I loved it and didn’t want it to end.” – Helen Fielding“[An] impressively learned narrative... approachable and enlightening... Shone evinces an intuitive knowledge of what makes audiences respond... One of those rare film books that walks the fine line between populist tub-thumping and sky-is-falling, Sontag-esque screed.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Exhilarating.... wit, style and a good deal of cheeky scorn for the opinions of bien-pensant liberal intellectuals.” – Phillip French, Times Literary Supplement

“Startlingly original... his ability to sum up an actor or director in one well-turned phrase is reminiscent of Pauline Kael’s... the first and last word on the subject. For anyone interested in film, this book is a must read.” – Toby Young, The Spectator

“A history of caring” – Louis Menand, The New Yorker“Smart, observant… nuanced and original, a conversation between the kid who saw Star Wars a couple dozen times and the adult who's starting to think that a handful might have sufficed.” – Chris Tamarri, The Village Voice

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